Wednesday Wetness

With Annie Lee 🌊 Freedive & Scuba｜Model 📍 Based in PH｜Taiwanese American

Bay Journal, Rappahannock Tribe files appeal over withdrawal permit for Virginia river

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Redhead in the Snow up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

What Happened to VAs Offshore Wind Power

From CFACT, The story behind Trump’s order halting Virginia offshore wind. Basically, the Navy always opposed it for restricting their operations and interfering with their electronics. The Biden administration told them to shut up and take it, while the Trump administration listened to them. Dead birds, whale safety and energy supply had very little to do with it. But read it anyway.

VA Ocean Wind Project Deep Sixed

 WHRO whines Dominion’s offshore wind project is one of 5 suspended by the Trump administration

Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project off the Virginia Beach coast is one of five major offshore wind projects around the U.S. whose leases were “paused” today by the U.S. Interior Department, citing unspecified national security concerns. The Interior Department said national security risks were identified in recent classified defense reports.

The Dominion project is the largest of its kind in the U.S., and construction is underway off the Virginia Beach coast. According to Dominion, the federal government ordered a 90-day suspension of work. 

“Stopping CVOW for any length of time will threaten grid reliability for some of the nation’s most important war fighting, AI and civilian assets,” Dominion said in a statement. “It will also lead to energy inflation and threaten thousands of jobs.” “Virginia’s grid needs addition of electrons, not subtraction,” Dominion added. “We stand ready to do what is necessary to get these vital electrons flowing as quickly as possible.”

The pause is meant to give the Trump administration, which has criticized wind projects, “time to work with leaseholders and state partners to assess the possibility of mitigating the national security risks posed by these projects,” according to the statement issued by Interior.

“Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement.

The other projects are Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, Revolution Wind at Rhode Island and Connecticut and the Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind projects in New York, according to the Associated Press.

Think of the whales! Real Clear Policy explains the possible national security consequences of offshore wind power, Offshore Wind Harms National Security

Some of the most egregious abuses involve the offshore wind farms that mar some of America’s most pristine seascapes. These projects cost taxpayers billions in subsidies and do grave harm to marine ecosystems. These ocean projects also lead directly to job losses in commercial fisheries, higher electricity rates, and energy output that remains intermittent and unreliable.

These offshore farms also put our national security at risk. Permitted aggressively during the Obama and Biden administrations, these developments pose genuine dangers to U.S. strategic readiness. President Trump should make his Executive Order on Offshore Wind permanent and halt the entire enterprise and commit to canceling these leases outright.

Offshore wind turbines interfere with long-range surveillance systems, particularly the PAVE PAWS network—the Precision Acquisition Vehicle Entry Phased Array Warning System. Located on both coasts, its radar arrays track ballistic missile launches, space objects, and foreign military activity. These systems depend on clear, stable electromagnetic environments. Massive steel turbines—hundreds of feet tall, rotating at variable speeds, and clustered across wide swaths of ocean—create moving radar reflections and clutter that degrade detection and tracking.

The Department of Defense has repeatedly warned that offshore wind can interfere with radar by scattering signals, generating Doppler confusion, and creating false targets. Officials may try to downplay these concerns for political reasons, but the physics do not bend to political narratives. A single utility-scale wind farm poses risks; dozens permitted to be built along the coastline in direct line of sight of early-warning systems pose a systemic threat.

Supporters claim such interference can be engineered away, but no proven technical solution exists. For decades, the Pentagon restricted turbine development near radar sites for precisely this reason. What changed was not the science—it was the pure and simple: green politics.

This vulnerability is magnified by the fact that many of these offshore wind leases are owned or majority-controlled by foreign corporations, including Ørsted, a Danish state-backed enterprise. Foreign ownership does not imply malicious intent, but it does raise an unavoidable question: should the federal government grant long-term access to strategically sensitive maritime territory—used for Navy training lanes, flight paths, submarine navigation, and radar coverage—to companies whose obligations lie outside the United States, all on the taxpayer dime?

I don't know for sure offshore wind power kills whales, but on the other hand, I don't know that they don't either. Just build nukes  

The Wednesday Wetness

 Done come on Tuesday this week, With Kristi Makusha, water dancer:

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Probably Not Mrs. Santa up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

Old Maryland Dove Retired

At the Bay Net, 1978 Dove Hauled Out Of The St. Mary’s River For The Final Time

After 44 years of service, the 1978 Dove was hauled out of the St. Mary’s River for the final time on January 17, 2023..

Designed by William Avery Baker (deceased) and built in Cambridge, Maryland by James B. Richardson (deceased), the ship was based on the small merchant vessel that sailed to the Maryland colony in the 1600s.

1978 Dove is owned by the state of Maryland and operated and maintained by the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission.

That strikes me as rather small vessel for routine trans-Atlantic travel.

1978 Dove served as the floating ambassador for Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC), occasionally traveling to different ports of call in Maryland. When not on outreach trips, the ship was an outdoor exhibit at the living history museum.

The age and natural deterioration of 1978 Dove necessitated HSMC to commission the design, construction and launch of a new Maryland Dove.

A bad cellphone pic of the new Dove from a fishing trip

 It's a shame they needed to pull it.

Built in full view of the public at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael’s, Maryland, the new ship was launched in the summer of 2022.

After careful consideration and examination of the ship in winter 2022, HSMC staff determined 1978 Dove should be taken out of the St. Mary’s River one final time.

Historic St. Mary’s City Commission is actively pursuing alternatives to make the best use of 1978 Dove.

We've seen, and been on the Dove for a short motor trip in the St. Marys River. Our daughter-in-law, Abi, worked at St. Mary's City, and crewed on the Dove on occasions.

Message in a Bottle Goes from Maryland to Ireland

 Chesapeake Bay Mag, Md. Boy Follows Message In A Bottle To Ireland

When an Ocean City teen tossed a message in a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean, he never dreamed he’d be forever connected to a couple in Ireland, who found the bottle washed up on the beach 3,000 miles from where it started, against all odds.

But this fall the young man got to travel all the way to Ireland, tracing the bottle’s journey and uniting with those who discovered it. Cheryl Costello has the moving update to this improbable story. Watch below:

Suit Seeks to Legalize Swimming with Dolphins

Janet Levy at Am Think, Swimming with Dolphins Ban - Regulatory Overreach?

Who decides whether you may or may not swim with dolphins? You may think this is determined by some environment-related law, made by elected representatives who constitute the legislature. But the generalities of law are often translated into the specifics of practice through rules and regulations made and enforced by officials. Not all these officials answer to the checks and balances of the democratic process. Therein lies the scope for them to further political agendas or the interests of pressure groups unsanctified by the ballot, which alone represents the will of the people of America. It is for this reason that a landmark lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an arbitrary ban on human-dolphin interactions in Hawaii gains importance.

The ban was proposed in 2016 and finalized in October 2021 by officials of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce. The NMFS, supervised by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is “responsible for the management, conservation, and protection of living marine resources within about 200 miles of the U.S. coast.” The rule was framed by a civil servant under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. It prohibits “persons, vessels or other objects” from “swimming with, approaching, or remaining within 50 yards” of a Hawaiian spinner dolphin (Stenella longisrostris), claiming that such interactions cause habitat displacement and disturb dolphin behavior patterns, especially that of coming to shore by day to rest and nurture their young.

 

The stark arbitrariness of the ban is evident from the following: a) spinner dolphins are abundant around Hawaii, and there is no evidence of a population decline; b) dolphins, as is well known, are friendly and approach humans for benign, exuberant interactions; c) the ban applies only to tourism-related businesses, while the captive dolphin industry is exempt from it; and d) military activities, which might endanger dolphins with shelling, sonar, and underwater explosions, are also exempt.

The lawsuit against the ban (Eliza Willie v. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo) has been brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a “nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans ' liberties when threatened by government overreach and abuse.” It is pending before the U.S. District Court, Maryland. The main signatory to the lawsuit is Ms. Willie, an experiential therapist who uses dolphin-assisted psychotherapy to help patients in long-term recovery from addictions and other ailments. The two other signatories are Shelley Perry, who owns Dolphin Discoveries, a tourism business, and Lisa Dennings, a dolphin tour guide. The ban has caused all three substantial business losses.

The crux of the lawsuit is whether bureaucrats without a legal appointment making them accountable can decide on such weighty matters. It challenges as unconstitutional the NMFS’s rule-making, which dodges accountability as required under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. More specifically under Clause 2.2.1.3.2, which distinguishes between constitutional officers and non-constitutional ones. Section 2 identifies heads of agencies as ‘officers’ of the government, nominated by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. It ensures accountability by enshrining the public confirmation process. Rule-making, therefore, cannot be delegated to officials not appointed by this process of presidential selection and vetting and approval by the Senate.

This has been well-established by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Raymond Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) case of 2018. Lucia, whose company offered a retirement wealth management strategy, had been charged with violations of anti-fraud regulations. An administrative law judge (ALJ) imposed sanctions and a lifetime bar on the company. Ruling in favor of Lucia, the court observed that the ALJ is not a constitutionally appointed “Officer of the United States” and ordered a new “hearing before a properly appointed official.”

Michael Poon, an attorney for the PLF, believes that similarly, the ban on approaching or interacting with dolphins is a regulation made by a bureaucrat not legally appointed to do so. He states that when regulations have devastating implications for businesses and individuals, decision-makers can be held accountable. “Under the Constitution,” he says, “issuing regulations is the job of appointed officials who answer to the democratic process, not low-level career bureaucrats.”

Dolphin watching, swimming with dolphins and related activities have been a significant part of the Hawaiian tourist industry for decades, and a thriving business for tour operators, guides, boat captains, and therapists. They have created thousands of jobs and sustained other down-the-line businesses, adding to the state’s economy while providing tourists with a unique experience. The plaintiffs contend that the ban is a threat to Hawaii’s tourism industry and deny that dolphins are harmed during these activities. Business owners say they take great care to interact with dolphins on their own terms and only when dolphins initiate contact. “When the dolphins don’t want to be with us, they don’t participate,” says Nancy Sweatt, a U.S. Coast Guard captain and owner of Dolphin Journeys, bristling at the idea of a ban. “There’s no way a human can harm a dolphin without a weapon. They can swim faster and dive deeper – up to nearly 1,000 feet – and can easily evade humans.”

What makes the ban unreasonable is the fact that spinner dolphins are under no threat. In 2019, the Marine Mammal Commission noted that the species is abundant in the insular and pelagic ecosystems of Hawaii. At the time, it estimated a minimum population of 665 for four insular groups of dolphins. Sweatt gives a more optimistic estimate, saying the population has increased markedly – from 200-300 in 1995, when she started her business, to 700-1,000 today. Even the Federal Register notes: “We recognize that there is not clear evidence of population decline or adverse biological impacts.” But it adds that a “precautionary approach is the best way to protect and conserve Hawaiian spinner dolphin populations….” The ban is evidently not based on diligent analysis of the dolphin population and long-term trends.

When the ban was proposed in 2016 and a 60-day period was set for public responses, several alternative management options were put forth. But the NMFS ignored them. For reasons best known to the officials who framed the ban, the billion-dollar dolphin captivity industry, operating under zoo rules, remains unaffected by the ban though dolphins belong in the wild, not in pools and tanks. Military activities, too, are allowed to continue unhindered in dolphin habitats.

It will be interesting to see who prevails in this contentious case. At stake is not only the vibrant tourism industry of Hawaii, but also the power of the American people – and businesses, the mainstay of American capitalism – to hold all public decision-makers to account. Without that power, the shadow government of unelected officials exercising executive and legal powers without constitutional authority or oversight will gain in strength. Their agenda-driven coup will triumph over American citizens, American businesses, and American minds. We will end up being told what to do, how to act, what to think. No questions.

There’s an interesting sidelight to this case. Lanny Sinkin, an attorney from Hilo, Hawaii, has filed a petition for review of law on behalf of the Family of Dolphins Church, which says the ban violates its adherents’ right to religious freedom. The church claims a 20-year-old spiritual practice of interacting with dolphins.\

It's a pretty big ocean, and dolphins are pretty fast. If they didn't want to be around swimmers, they would move away.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Monday: The Best Rack In Hollywood? up running at The Other McCain.

Virginia Blues Have the Blues

The Virginian-Pilot, Virginia’s bluefish catch is shrinking — so is the state’s quota for commercial fisherman

A long-term drop in Virginia’s commercial catch of bluefish has sparked a deep cut in the state’s share of the coastwide quota. The latest amendment to the fishery’s management plan cuts Virginia’s share of the Atlantic coast quota from 11.88% to 5.87% — the biggest reduction for any of the coastal states. New York and Massachusetts are the biggest gainers, with New York’s share rising from 10.39% to 19.76% and Massachusetts’ from 6.72% to 10.12%. In addition to the new state allocations, the total coastwide allocation for commercial fishermen is declining from 17% of all bluefish landed to 14%. The difference means an increased share for recreational fisherman, from 83% to 86%.

 

All those changes are to be phased in over seven years, according to the fishery plan managers, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. The aim is to rebuild the total stock of bluefish. Bluefish have been overfished, but with the total catch down from a peak of about 180 million pounds in 1987 to just under 19 million pounds in 2019, they are not currently overfished.

On top of the allocation cut, Virginia has agreed to transfer 50,000 pounds of its bluefish quota to New York State — another sign of how much the state fishery has shrunk.

 

“The bluefish population does appear to be moving north as are other species,” said Patrick J. Geer, chief of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission’s Fisheries Management Division. “Warming water temperatures are part of the issue, but population density is higher” in the waters off New England, New York and New Jersey, he said.

Both factors are driving the shift in quotas, as well as a shift in commercial fishing operations. Virginia’s commercial catch has been sliding since around 2008, Geer said. The average over the past five years is about a quarter the typical catch from the first decade of the 21st century. Virginia’s commercial catch hit a high of about 800,000 pounds in 2001 but fell to just under 100,000 pounds last year.

 

Since the commercial fishery takes only about 13% of all bluefish landed, the quota shifts shouldn’t have an effect on recreational fishermen, Geer said. They landed nearly 3 million pounds in 2007, a recent peak. Last year’s landings fell to about 1.25 million pounds, from 2 million the year before.

I don't buy the "climate change" theory for affecting Bluefish abundance. Blues are plenty well adapted to live in warm water. When I moved to Florida from Oregon in 1983, blues were common there as well as in the Bay, and it was certainly warmer there then than it its in Virginia and Maryland now.  What I believe drive the abundance of blues is food. A fast, migratory fish, with a voracious appetite, blues follow the big schools of bait. There's simply no doubt that the Menhaden reduction fishery in the Bay, and in the nearby coast has reduced the abundance of menhaden, quite probably reducing the food available to blues, and prompting them to seek it elsewhere. It is notable that the states to the north of us don't permit the vast commercial Menhaden fishery.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Bunny Girl Senpai ready for your digital delight.

Primitive Deep Sea Fishing

A Terrifying Deep-Sea Fish Filmed For The First Time

Astonishing fish, close to the monkfish, the dragon of the abyss uses a luminous organ to attract its prey. The animal is rare and very few images show it evolving in its natural environment. During an exploration carried out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, they were able to bring back some footage of this strange specimen.

According to the Monterey Bay AquariumResearch Institute (Mbari), who took the footage, it was the first time that the animal had been filmed at sea. After this recording, biologists recovered the fishfor his observation. Indeed, its study will provide a better understanding of the animal and thus help its conservation in the natural environment. This is an opportunity for scientists to learn more about this surprising animal of the abyss.

More deep sea fishing:

Linked by EBL in The Tempest 🎭⛈️, Sad Kentucky Derby Day 😢🏇🏻🥃😷☣️,   Porgy and Bess 🎭, Celebrate Chanti Day 🍷, Carole King: It Might As Well Rain Until September 🌧️,Lulu 🎭, Nixon in China with Ginger Costa Jackson 🎭🇨🇳🇺🇸 and Peter Grimes 🎭. Wombat has Early Morning Rule 5 Monday: Kaia Gerber ready for your digital delight.

Cool Stuff!

I don't really want to do posts on each of these separately, but these came across the bow, and they seemed pretty interesting. Science marches on (even if I'm not playing).

Pliny the Elder

Remains Found by Pompeii Really Are Pliny the Elder, New Tests Indicate

A team of Italian researchers have strengthened the case that at least the cranium found near Pompeii 100 years ago really does belong to Pliny the Elder, a Roman military leader and polymath who perished while leading a rescue mission following the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. However, a jawbone that had been found with the skull evidently belonged to somebody else.

Over the last couple of years the experts, including anthropologists and geneticists, conducted a host of scientific tests on the skull and lower mandible that had been found a century ago on the shore near Pompeii, which have since been at the center of a scholarly debate as to whether they should be attributed to Pliny.
. . .
In a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus, the younger Pliny recounts that his uncle ordered his fleet to set sail for the Vesuvius area, both to investigate the phenomenon and to help “the many people who lived on that beautiful coast."

According to Pliny the Younger, the fleet and its commander disembarked at Stabiae, a town on the shore near Pompeii. But as he was leading a group of survivors to safety, Pliny the Elder was overtaken by a cloud of poisonous gas, and suffocated to death on the beach at age 56.
. . .
So, to sum up this century-old forensic mystery: we have a skull of a high-ranking Roman official who died at the time, place and circumstances in which ancient sources say this occurred; his DNA and skull are compatible with the age and ancestry of the ‘hero of Pompeii.’  . . . 

Mysterious particles spewing from Antarctica defy physics. I think they covered this one in Star Gate, the series, you know, the one starring Morena Baccarin. Hint, it was aliens!

Our best model of particle physics is bursting at the seams as it struggles to contain all the weirdness in the universe. Now, it seems more likely than ever that it might pop, thanks to a series of strange events in Antarctica.

The death of this reigning physics paradigm, the Standard Model, has been predicted for decades. There are hints of its problems in the physics we already have. Strange results from laboratory experiments suggest flickers of ghostly new species of neutrinos beyond the three described in the Standard Model. And the universe seems full of dark matter that no particle in the Standard Model can explain.

But recent tantalizing evidence might one day tie those vague strands of data together: Three times since 2016, ultra-high-energy particles have blasted up through the ice of Antarctica, setting off detectors in the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a machine dangling from a NASA balloon far above the frozen surface.
. . .
ANITA picks up only the most extreme high-energy neutrinos, Barbano said, and if the upward-flying particles were cosmic-accelerator-boosted neutrinos from the Standard Model — most likely tau neutrinos — then the beam should have come with a shower of lower-energy particles that would have tripped IceCube's lower-energy detectors.

"We looked for events in seven years of IceCube data," Barbano said — events that matched the angle and length of the ANITA detections, which you'd expect to find if there were a significant battery of cosmic neutrino guns out there firing at Earth to produce these up-going particles. But none turned up.

Their results don't completely eliminate the possibility of an accelerator source out there. But they do "severely constrain" the range of possibilities, eliminating all of the most plausible scenarios involving cosmic accelerators and many less-plausible ones.

"The message we want to convey to the public is that a Standard Model astrophysical explanation does not work no matter how you slice it," Barbano said.

Newly discovered underwater volcanic range is teeming with bizarre, tiny fanged fish

While on a recent mission to map the sea floor in their new ocean explorer, RV Investigator, researchers with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) made a startling discovery just off the coast from Sydney, Australia: An extinct volcanic range teeming with nightmarish fish, reports CSIRO News.

One of the fish found lurking in this undersea range is the creature pictured above, a tiny, jet black, fanged, scaleless creature. Chief scientist for the voyage, UNSW marine biologist professor Iain Suthers, said he was amazed by how many of these little creatures could be found so far out to sea. The discovery could change how researchers study juvenile fish.

"We had thought fish only developed in coastal estuaries, and that once larvae were swept out to sea, that was end of them," explained Suthers. "But in fact, these eddies are nursery grounds for commercial fisheries along the east coast of Australia."

The features of the sea floor, such as with the underwater volcanic range discovered on this voyage, can create eddies that provide ideal places for life to flourish. The scaleless black fish is not the only strange creature discovered. Also lurking were eel-like idiacanthidae and the ever-frightening chauliodontidae . . . 

The science is not settled. And that's a good thing.

Just One Word: Plastic!

One reputation for plastic is that plastic waste is forever, but a recent study from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute shows that plastics in the ocean are broken down at relatively rapid rates: Simulated sunlight reveals how 98% of plastics at sea go missing each year

A team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, East China Normal University and Northeastern University conducted a unique study to help elucidate the mystery of missing plastic fragments at sea. Their work provides novel insight regarding the removal mechanisms and potential lifetimes of a select few microplastics.

For the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, researchers selected plastic polymers prevalently found on the ocean surface and irradiated them using a solar simulator system. The samples were irradiated under simulated sunlight for approximately two months to capture the kinetics of plastic dissolution. Twenty-four hours was the equivalent of about one solar day of photochemical exposure in the subtropical ocean gyre surface waters. To assess the physical and chemical photodegradation of these plastics, researchers used optical microscopy, electron microscopy, and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy.

Results showed that simulated sunlight increased the amount of dissolved carbon in the water and made those tiny plastic particles tinier. It also fragmented, oxidized and altered the color of the irradiated polymers. Rates of removal depended upon polymer chemistry. Engineered polymer solutions (recycled plastics) degraded more rapidly than polypropylene (e.g. consumer packaging) and polyethylene (e.g. plastic bags, plastic films, and containers including bottles), which were the most photo-resistant polymers studied.

Based on the linear extrapolation of plastic mass loss, engineered polymer solutions (2.7 years) and the North Pacific Gyre (2.8 years) samples had the shortest lifetimes, followed by polypropylene (4.3 years), polyethylene (33 years), and standard polyethylene (49 years), used for crates, trays, bottles for milk and fruit juices, and caps for food packaging.

These are relatively short life-times for substances in the oceans; even highly reactive (and toxic) trace metals have life spans estimated in the tens of years.

“For the most photoreactive microplastics such as expanded polystyrene and polypropylene, sunlight may rapidly remove these polymers from ocean waters. Other, less photodegradable microplastics such as polyethylene, may take decades to centuries to degrade even if they remain at the sea surface,” said Shiye Zhao, Ph.D., senior author and a post-doc researcher working in the laboratory of Tracy Mincer, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biology/biogeochemistry at FAU’s Harbor Branch and Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College. “In addition, as these plastics dissolve at sea, they release biologically active organic compounds, which are measured as total dissolved organic carbon, a major byproduct of sunlight-driven plastic photodegradation.”

And what happens to these organic compounds? It turns out that marine bacteria eat them. A little secret, there are bacteria out there that will degrade almost anything that they can extract energy out of by degrading it further; if there aren't any, and a substrate becomes newly available, bacteria will rapidly evolve to take advantage of the new food source.

Zhao and collaborators also checked the biolability of plastic-derived dissolved organic carbon upon marine microbes. These dissolved organics seem to be broadly biodegradable and a drop in the ocean compared to natural biolabile marine dissolved organic carbon. However, some of these organics or their co-leachates may inhibit microbial activity. The dissolved organic carbon released as most plastics photodegraded was readily utilized by marine bacteria.

“The potential that plastics are releasing bio-inhibitory compounds during photodegradation in the ocean could impact microbial community productivity and structure, with unknown consequences for the biogeochemistry and ecology of the ocean,” said Zhao. “One of four polymers in our study had a negative effect on bacteria. More work is needed to determine whether the release of bioinhibitory compounds from photodegrading plastics is a common or rare phenomenon.”

These results should surprise no one who has ever picked up a piece of plastic that's been left out in the sun for a season or two and had it crumble in their hands.

The Wombat is back in business, with Rule Five Sunday: Black Widow.

Evolution in Action

Miley Cyrus Won’t Reproduce Until She’s Confident Her Kid Can ‘Live on an Earth with Fish’

Pop star turned Planned Parenthood activist Miley Cyrus will not consider having a child due to global warming-related anxiety, vowing not to reproduce until she is confident her offspring can “live on an earth with fish in the water.” (Fact check: fish currently exist in bodies of water all over the planet).

Shush! Forget it, she's rolling!

The “Mother’s Daughter” singer spoke at length to Elle and hit two of her go-to political topics: Feminism and climate change.

Cyrus tied the two topics together, assigning the female gender to the planet and warning against mankind’s destruction of it.

“When she’s angry, don’t fuck with her,” Cyrus said. “That’s the way that I feel women are like right now. The earth is angry.”

The pop activist also revealed that she will not have kids until she feels like her child “would live on an earth with fish in the water.”

“We’ve been doing the same thing to the earth that we do to women,” she said, making another comparison to feminism.

Being female has been berry, berry good to Miley.

“We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it’s exhausted. It can’t produce. We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child,” the Grammy-winner continued. “Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.
”

Millennials as a whole, Cyrus claimed, feel the same way.

“We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it,” she said.

When you consider the carbon foot print of her tours and shows, it's probably a good thing she won't reproduce. Until she reduces that to zero, and not by buying some of Al Gore's imaginary carbon offsets, I don't want to hear from her.

If it was that bad, you'd think she'd be afraid of the ocean, right?

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Kathy Zhu up and running on time and within budget.

RIP: Wally Broecker

Wallace Broecker, circa 2010 (Bruce Gilbert. Courtesy
 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)

By way of Watts Up With That:

From Columbia University Earth Institute

Wallace Broecker, a geochemist who initiated key research into the history of earth’s climate and humans’ influence upon it, died Feb. 18 in New York. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his family. His death was confirmed by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where he spent a career that spanned nearly 67 years.

One of the first scientists to predict an imminent rise in earth’s temperature due to human output of carbon dioxide, Broecker was credited with introducing the phrase “global warming” into the scientific lexicon in the 1970s. Much of his work focused on the oceans. Among other things, his studies of marine chemistry helped lay out the map of global ocean circulation, and its powerful effects on climate. His studies also helped lay the basis for many other scientists’ work in a variety of fields. Not content to just do research, he made friends with and extended his influence to powerful figures in government and business.

Broecker—universally known as Wally—at first made an unlikely scientist. Born Nov. 29, 1931, the second of five children, he grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. His father, also named Wallace, ran a gas station. His mother was the former Edith Smith. Both parents were evangelical Christians who rejected modern geologic theory for the literal Biblical interpretation that the earth is just a few thousand years old. They also forbade drinking, dancing and movies. Broecker attended Illinois’ fundamentalist Christian Wheaton College, then the recent alma mater of preacher Billy Graham. While still a student, he married the former Grace Carder, and spoke of becoming an insurance actuary.

Broecker got sidetracked after an older Wheaton student helped him arrange a summer 1952 lab internship at what was then called Lamont Geological Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y. The student was Paul Gast, who later went on to head NASA’s moon-rock program. At Lamont, Broecker worked with J. Laurence Kulp, a geochemist doing pioneering work on radiocarbon dating, a then revolutionary new method that allowed researchers to tell the ages of materials as far back as 40,000 years.

By his own account, Broecker had fun tinkering with the lab equipment, and he was excited by the newly wide-open chance to make discoveries about nature using carbon dating. He transferred to Columbia that fall and kept working with Kulp. The move suggested he had rejected at least some of his family’s religious beliefs; however, some other students made fun of his background, calling him a “theo-chemist.” While other students were sent on ocean research cruises, he was left off the list for his first eight years. Nevertheless, he earned a PhD. in geology in 1958 and stayed around, gradually rising to the first rank of prominence. In a 2016 memoir he called Lamont “my Garden of Eden.”

“My great joy in life comes in figuring something out,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “I figure something out about every six months or so, and I write about it and encourage research on it, and that’s the joy of my life.”

One of Broecker’s first achievements was a series of papers demolishing the stock idea that it took tens of thousands of years for water to circulate between shallow and deep regions of the world’s oceans. His analyses of carbon isotopes collected by Lamont ships from around the world showed that water could make the switch in just centuries—a discovery showed that the oceans are far more dynamic than previously thought. This in turn implied that the oceans could potentially affect the composition of the atmosphere, or vice-versa.

Using chemical tracers and other data, Broecker laid out the
picture of global ocean circulation, and its implications for climate.
 (Courtesy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) 

Starting in 1960, Broecker sailed on many of the world’s oceans and seas. In addition to sampling water, he maintained instruments, helped winch seafloor sediment cores to the surface, and threw dynamite overboard to produce explosions whose echoes were read to chart the bottom. In the 1970s, he co-led a global program funded by the U.S. government to use a wide variety of trace metals, nutrients and isotopes of radioactive elements to map the circulation of the deep ocean, the exchange of gases with the atmosphere, and other marine processes. This collective work provided the underpinnings for virtually all later studies of marine chemistry, and the oceans’ relationship to climate. It was Broecker who provided a running commentary for a documentary film on the project while on a cruise from Tahiti to San Diego. He used related geochemical methods to study lake waters, sediments and rocks in Canada and the American West for clues about climates of the past, with a special interest in the comings and goings of ice ages.

Early on, Broecker became interested in how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and what effects this might have on climate. The history and behavior of atmospheric carbon dioxide were poorly known when he started out, but by the early 1970s, other researchers had analyzed ice cores from the Greenland ice and shown that they could track levels of atmospheric CO2 through the distant past. Work by others suggested that higher CO2 levels could be correlated with periods of warming. And scientists had speculated since the 19th century that rising output of human-produced CO2 could potentially warm the planet; some of Broecker’s contemporaries, including Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, were already tracking CO2 levels in real time and considering the effects.

In August 1975, Broecker synthesized his and others’ related research in the journal Science in a piece called “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” It was later said to be the first time the phrase was used in a scientific paper. In it, he argued that humans were changing the climate by emitting CO2; it just wasn’t evident yet, because the world was experiencing what he believed was a natural 40-year cooling cycle that was masking the effects. He predicted that the cycle would soon reverse, and then the manmade warming on top of that would become dramatically visible. It later turned out that he had misinterpreted some of the ice-core data, but had the overall picture right. Right on cue in 1976, temperatures started ascending, and have continued since then pretty much along the trajectory Broecker laid out.

Receiving the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton,
 1996 (Courtesy Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)

“Global warming” was quickly adopted by the science world, including in the first large-scale report on the subject, published in 1979 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Decades later, when some credited Broecker with coining the phrase, he shrugged it off as “dumb luck.” He warned that he would turn over in his grave if someone put “global warming” on his tombstone. He once offered $200 to any student who could find an earlier citation for the phrase. (One postgrad did find it in a 1958 editorial in the Hammond Times of Indiana. It apparently didn’t catch on at that time.)

Broecker and a handful of other scientists began briefing government leaders on climate change in the 1980s. He testified at the first congressional hearings dealing with the subject, led in 1984 by then Tennessee Representative Al Gore. Over succeeding years, as the science advanced, Gore and other politicians repeatedly met with and consulted Broecker to have him explain.

In the mid-1980s Broecker synthesized a grand picture of world ocean circulation, based on his and others’ studies. He dubbed it “The Great Ocean Conveyor.” In simplest terms, it is a vast river of warm, shallow water flowing from the south Pacific into the Indian Ocean, rounding Africa and then heading north through the Atlantic. Once it hits cold water from the Arctic, the water then cools and sinks near northern Europe. From there, it loops through the abyss back to the Pacific to warm, rise and begin the cycle again. The flow is so huge, Broecker asserted, that it must help regulate global climate by moving around vast amounts of heat from one place to another. This idea soon became general consensus.

And since the ocean has roughly 60 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere, it also move vast amounts of CO2 around and sequesters it.

Broecker then put forth the idea that the conveyor could suddenly switch on and off, leading to drastic climate shifts–not over millennia, as many had come to think, but perhaps just decades. He pointed to an apparently rapid cooling some 12,000 years ago that threw Europe and other regions into a temporary deep freeze. Paradoxically, he argued, the cause might have been a then-warming climate and the collapse of northern ice sheets, which introduced a pulse of freshwater that pushed back on the conveyor. He warned that “the uncontrolled experiment” of modern human-induced warming might bring similar rapid changes. He was fond of saying, “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

Climatologists are still debating whether and how rapid climate swings might take place today. That notwithstanding, Broecker’s ideas were taken up and wildly exaggerated in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, which featured a climate-change-powered tsunami engulfing Manhattan and then freezing into an ice sheet–all in the same day. They were more credibly explained in possibly the only pop song about physical oceanography, “Uncle Wally’s Tale,” by the singer Tom Chapin. (Chapin was Broecker’s brother-in-law, married to Broecker’s younger sister, Bonnie.)

Broecker was one of the few scientists I know of who could be universally known just from his first name. RIP, Wally.

Surf's Up!

Good news for surfers from Watts Up With That: Upper-ocean warming is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger. From EurekAlert!

Upper-ocean warming is changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger. Increasing wave energy with climate change means more challenges for coastal risk and adaptation.

Sea level rise puts coastal areas at the forefront of the impacts of climate change, but new research shows they face other climate-related threats as well. In a study published January 14 in Nature Communications, researchers report that the energy of ocean waves has been growing globally, and they found a direct association between ocean warming and the increase in wave energy.

A wide range of long-term trends and projections carry the fingerprint of climate change, including rising sea levels, increasing global temperatures, and declining sea ice. Analyses of the global marine climate thus far have identified increases in wind speeds and wave heights in localized areas of the ocean in the high latitudes of both hemispheres. These increases have been larger for the most extreme values (e.g., winter waves) than for the mean conditions. However, a global signal of change and a correlation between the localized increases in wave heights and global warming had remained undetected.

The new study focused on the energy contained in ocean waves, which is transmitted from the wind and transformed into wave motion. This metric, called wave power, has been increasing in direct association with historical warming of the ocean surface. The upper ocean warming, measured as a rising trend in sea-surface temperatures, has influenced wind patterns globally, and this, in turn, is making ocean waves stronger.

“For the first time, we have identified a global signal of the effect of global warming in wave climate. In fact, wave power has increased globally by 0.4 percent per year since 1948, and this increase is correlated with the increasing sea-surface temperatures, both globally and by ocean regions,” said lead author Borja G. Reguero, a researcher in the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Climate change is modifying the oceans in different ways, including changes in ocean-atmosphere circulation and water warming, according to coauthor Inigo J. Losada, director of research at the Environmental Hydraulics Institute at the University of Cantabria (IHCantabria), where the study was developed.

“This study shows that the global wave power can be a potentially valuable indicator of global warming, similarly to carbon dioxide concentration, the global sea level rise, or the global surface atmospheric temperature,” Losada said.

Understanding how the energy of ocean waves responds to oceanic warming has important implications for coastal communities, including anticipating impacts on infrastructure, coastal cities, and small island states. Ocean waves determine where people build infrastructure, such as ports and harbors, or require protection through coastal defenses such as breakwaters and levees. Indeed, wave action is one of the main drivers of coastal change and flooding, and as wave energy increases, its effects can become more profound. Sea level rise will further aggravate these effects by allowing more wave energy to reach shoreward.

While the study reveals a long-term trend of increasing wave energy, the effects of this increase are particularly apparent during the most energetic storm seasons, as occurred during the winter of 2013-14 in the North Atlantic, which impacted the west coast of Europe, or the devastating 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean, which offered a harsh reminder of the destructive power and economic impacts of coastal storms.

The effects of climate change will be particularly noticeable at the coast, where humans and oceans meet, according to coauthor Fernando J. Méndez, associate professor at Universidad de Cantabria. “Our results indicate that risk analysis neglecting the changes in wave power and having sea level rise as the only driver may underestimate the consequences of climate change and result in insufficient or maladaptation,” he said.

So wave power is increasing 0.4% annually over 60 years is 24%? You're telling me waves are 24% more powerful than waves at the end of WWII? I doubt it! Although, to be fair, the power of a wave increases as the square of the height, so the actual change in height of waves would be only 6% (assuming constant wavelength, a weak, but acceptable approximation). I would love to see the historical data showing a real significant increase in wave height or energy, but I suspect this is a "model" study.

There's very little evidence of long term change in weather in the modern era as a result of global warming. Tornadoes and tropical storms have not increased in number or severity, and their claims of increased heat content in the upper ocean causing the alleged increase winds are also grossly exaggerated: A Small Margin Of Error

When I saw that graph in Zeke’s tweet, my bad-number detector started flashing bright red. What I found suspicious was that the confidence intervals seemed far too small. Not only that, but the graph is measured in a unit that is meaningless to most everyone. Hmmm …

Now, the units in this graph are “zettajoules”, abbreviated ZJ. A zettajoule is a billion trillion joules, or 1E+21 joules. I wanted to convert this to a more familiar number, which is degrees Celsius (°C). So I had to calculate how many zettajoule it takes to raise the temperature of the top two kilometres of the ocean by 1°C.

I go over the math in the endnotes, but suffice it to say at this point that it takes about twenty-six hundred zettajoule to raise the temperature of the top two kilometres of the ocean by 1°C. 2,600 ZJ per degree.

Now, look at Figure 1 again. They claim that their error back in 1955 is plus or minus ninety-five zettajoules … and that converts to ± 0.04°C. Four hundredths of one degree celsius … right …

Call me crazy, but I do NOT believe that we know the 1955 temperature of the top two kilometres of the ocean to within plus or minus four hundredths of one degree.

It gets worse. By the year 2018, they are claiming that the error bar is on the order of plus or minus nine zettajoules … which is three thousandths of one degree C. That’s 0.003°C. Get real! Ask any process engineer—determining the average temperature of a typcial swimming pool to within three thousandths of a degree would require a dozen thermometers or more …

So, according to this, the upper ocean would have warmed perhaps 0.05°C since 1948? I think these numbers need serious massaging.

Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Sunday: The Kessler Twins up in the nick of time.

The Left Hand of Sharkness

Macquarie University researcher

 Sherrie Chambers releases a Port Jackson

 shark fitted with an acoustic tag.

Climate Change Is Making Sharks Right-Handed

Australian researchers recently bred Port Jackson sharks in a tank warmed to a temperature likely to occur at the end of the century if climate change continues unabated. These warmer waters made the sharks right-handed.

Australian scientists went snorkeling for shark eggs, then incubated those eggs in a special tank designed to simulate the hot, end-of-century temperatures expected to prevail if climate change continues unabated. Half of the sharks died within a month. The other half became right-handed.

The team of biologists from Macquarie University in Sydney knew from previous research that warming ocean temperatures alter the way fish grow and develop. The researchers wanted to find out whether these changes would also affect fish behavior — specifically, whether sharks raised in a tank warmed to projected end-of-century temperatures would show a preference for swimming one direction or another when faced with a Y-shaped pathway. Basically, could global warming make sharks right- or left-handed?

And why would we be tempted to ask that question?

Sharks, you may be tempted to point out, don’t actually have hands (they have fins, which are genetically not so far off from human arms). So, when scientists talk about the right or left “handedness” of sharks and other marine creatures, they’re talking about lateralization: the tendency for one half of an animal’s brain to automatically control certain behaviors. With simple, automated behaviors (say, your preference for writing with your right or left hand), this theoretically frees up mental energy for an animal to perform more-complex cognitive functions. In fish, lateralization might mean a default preference for swimming a certain way, which can help those fish forage for food or form schools.

“Since behavioral lateralization is an expression of brain function, it can be used as a barometer of normal brain development and function in some contexts,” the researchers wrote in a study published this summer in the journal Symmetry. “Namely, exposure or development under climate change conditions.”

 Still not clear.

To test whether warmer waters could force a shark to become lateralized, the researchers collected a clutch of Port Jackson shark eggs from the waters off of eastern Australia. The scientists incubated 12 eggs in a tank warmed to the current ambient temperature of the bay (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 20.6 degrees Celsius) and 12 others in a tank that was gradually warmed to 74.5 degrees F (23.6 degrees C) to simulate those predicted end-of-century ocean temperatures.

Five sharks incubated in the elevated temperatures died within a month of hatching. To test whether the remaining sharks had developed lateralization, the team placed each of those animals in a long tank with a Y-shaped partition at one end. Behind the partition was a food reward; sharks just had to decide whether to swim to the right or left side of the Y to reach their snack.

The authors found that sharks incubated in the elevated temperatures showed a strong preference for turning right. The sharks in the control group showed no preference one way or the other.

Read the rest of the story here.

Sounds like a pretty hokey study. Small sample size (7 sharks). So you take cold water sharks, raise their temperature artificially, killing almost half of them in the process, and are surprised that the remaining sharks act funny? In the real world, the sharks would simply move to cooler waters.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Eliza Dushku up at The Other McCain.

Free Swim Friday

Linked at The Right Way in Rule 5 Saturday LinkOrama. Wombat-socho has Rule 5 Sunday: Happy Birthday, Fan Bingbing, Wherever You Are and FMJRA 2.0: A Day Late & A Dollar Short ready for action.

People in the Mist

 Today's diversion was to take the walking trail up to the top of Trinidad Head (no, not that Trinidad). As you can see, it was rather foggy most of the time. Here is Mary setting the odometer on her phone. It's a 1.4 mile loop.

 A view of Trinidad Harbor and pier from the trail.

A wind bent fir tree, and the rollers on the coast to the north.

 Much of the rock is covered with dense brush, so dense in fact that in places it arches over the trail forming tunnels.

Near the summit, the fog got a little thinner, and it was almost sunny,

 Some parts of the trail are better than others.

 Near the summit is this cross. What! A cross on a public trail in California?

Another reminder on the way down.

 While there is an actual functioning lighthouse on the head (available to the public once a month), this monument used to be prominently sited on the road down to the harbor.

On it is another reminder that the sea can be a harsh mistress.